Obama’s Bush hangover

The rising chaos in Iraq — and the blame game over who’s responsible — are the latest reminders that halfway through his own second term, he’s still often more consumed by dealing with the legacy of President George W. Bush than building his own.

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Obama supporters see a president who found himself so deep in so many holes from his very first day in office that cleaning up the aftermath of the previous eight years was going to take at least eight of his own: getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, stabilizing the housing market and repairing the larger economic collapse, all while chopping a $1.2 trillion deficit in half.

To detractors, particularly those with allegiances to Bush, that argument comes off as another excuse for a president who’s been unable to deliver much — a man they see as so driven to be different from his predecessor that he’s often blundered into catastrophe.

To them, the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq — on what they say was a politically driven timetable, not a strategic one — was the latest clear case in point.

But the ripples from the Bush years go well beyond the Islamic militants marching toward Baghdad, larger foreign policy and the economy. There’s the detention facility in Guantánamo Bay that Obama’s 5½ years late in his promise to close. There’s the National Security Agency surveillance apparatus he inherited (and bulked up significantly).

And with 2½ years left, that shows little sign of changing.

“The hangover was much, much worse than I think any president’s been left with, with the exception of Andrew Johnson,” said Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee chairman, though he notes that in that case, he doesn’t blame Abraham Lincoln. “It underlines what unbelievable damage they did in just a short eight years.”

“Barack Obama has had to clean up the mess that was left him,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), ticking off the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, cutting the deficit and recovering from the recession. “On every front, he’s really moved forward for this nation.”

That kind of thinking, according to Bush’s first White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, is, in a word, “nonsense.”

“Every president gets the benefit and the burdens of all the presidents that came before them, including the most recent,” Fleischer said. “The only question is did they make things better or did they make things worse? And on almost every measure, President Barack Obama made them worse.”

“For the entire first term, Obama and his people blamed Bush for everything — which is another way of saying they felt Bush and the Bush years were the inescapable reference point for everything they were themselves doing,” said Elliott Abrams, a former top Bush National Security Council staffer. “Now in the second term, they still cannot get free of this shadow.”

The White House declined comment. But Brad Woodhouse, president of the White House-allied Americans United for Change, expressed the level of outraged disbelief that many Obama allies have been feeling the past few days.

“It takes some audacious nerve on behalf of Republicans to now — after opposing the president at every turn and after six years of putting their politics ahead of the country — to blame the president for instability in Iraq that is a direct result of a failed war started by his predecessor,” Woodhouse said. “The politics being played here by Republicans is enough to make you gag.”

Obama’s time in office hasn’t been totally dominated by responses to Bush’s — Obamacare, his largest legislative win, is the realization of a decades-old Democratic dream that long predates the last administration, and the significant environmental regulations he’s pressed forward have little to do with his predecessor.

But Obama himself has told people that he views his 2008 election as having been less about him than about the country’s rejection of Bush, and that any Democrat would have won in that environment — unlike 2012, which he views as the race that was more about people choosing him.

Still, even through that reelection campaign, Obama regularly pointed to Bush as the reason he hadn’t accomplished more. Remember how bad the economy was, he’d tell voters. Remember those two wars.